AHRQ Patient Safety Network

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The Fifth Discipline. Classic icon

Senge PM. New York, NY: Random House; 1990.

Senge’s seminal and oft-referenced book outlines five competencies that support a learning organization: systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, building shared vision, and team learning. He introduces the concept of systems thinking and describes how systems often conspire to create their own problems by failing to understand and improve their internal processes. Senge’s influence can be seen in much of the conceptual “systems thinking” literature in patient safety, such as Leape’s classic 1994 Journal of the American Medical Association commentary, Error in Medicine.